


Rootless

by scorpiod



Category: Byzantium (2012)
Genre: Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 01:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/pseuds/scorpiod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Brotherhood always finds them, Eleanor is tired of running, and letting go is harder than it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rootless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sibyllinear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sibyllinear/gifts).



> There are hints of Darvell/Clara and Eleanor/Frank, but that's all solidly background in this fic. Set after the movie. This didn't quite turn out the way I expected it but your prompts were great and I hope you have a happy yuletide!
> 
> Much thanks to my beta for beating this story into submission.

It’s ten years before Clara sees Eleanor again, and when it happens, it’s quick and sudden, more so than when Eleanor left her sight—walking off into the distance until she gradually disappeared, until she was a tiny dot against a backdrop of millions of people, disappearing into the fog). Clara was smoking at a pier in Spain, watching the waves roll back and looking for her next meal, and then Eleanor falls in step next to her.

It’s not the first time she’s seen Eleanor. Clara sees her daughter everywhere she looks—in film posters and crowds, coffee shops and by the side of the road—girls with big blue eyes and reddish brown hair, but they all lacked the wide solemn eyes, none of them sorrowful enough to be her daughter. They smiled too much. They acted like the teenagers Eleanor only looked like. They didn’t carry the weight of two hundred years in them. 

Eleanor stands before her again, her hair tied up in a ponytail, clad in dark greys and flip flop sandals. She looks the same and not all at once. There are no lines in her face to indicate any age or growth, but all the same, Clara feels removed, a distance that wasn’t there before, doesn’t matter how close she’s standing.

(She’s bought parenting books, those modern guides, there’s one for everything now—it’s supposed to be normal, for your child to go away and leave—they call this separation anxiety but it’s been ten years)

Clara wants to yell at her for how long she’s been away. Clara wants to hug her—to run and sweep her into her arms and never let her go again. She wants to stroke her hair and tell her _that was long enough, wasn’t it? Where shall we go off to now?_

Clara doesn’t do any of that, except stare at her daughter and try not to cry. _I thought you weren’t come back._

“It took me awhile to find you,” Eleanor speaks first. She doesn’t smile, so Clara mirrors her expression, keep her expression neutral. The least she could have is a smile from her daughter after seeing her for the first time in ten years.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Clara asks. She’s too curt when she says it, those shouldn’t be the first words to her daughter, but she can’t hide the note of derision in her mouth. She should try be nicer about him, but it’s just not in her nature.

“Away,” Eleanor says, something careful in the way she chooses her words, deliberate. She takes her time. “I told him not to come.”

“He left you?” Clara asks. She tries to suppress it, but fails at a neutral expression, her lips quirking up in a smirk. She knows that’s not what she said, but she can’t resist. “Or did you leave him?”

“Neither,” Eleanor says, with the same tired old voice— _yes, mother, I heard you, mother. I know, mother_. The way children get when they’ve heard you talk for too long. “We just don’t want to spend every waking moment together. It’s healthy, you see.”

Eleanor looks straight at her and meets her eyes—there’s a ghost in them, aging her years and years—and Clara has to look away.

*

They sit at some outdoor café, Eleanor ordering coffee just to hold it in her hand, warmth seeping into her skin. They’ve never had a problem with warmth, all things considered, but Eleanor enjoys feeling alive, connected. 

Eleanor is paying. Clara wants to ask how she got money, if she earned it honestly, like she always wanted to—ask how she’s been; where she’s gone; what she’s been up to—torn between wanting to hear everything about her daughter’s ten years and wanting to know nothing about it at all.

Clara keeps her mouth shut. 

“What have you been up to?” Eleanor asks before Clara gets a chance.

 _The same_ , Clara almost says but it’s not quite right—it’s not the same. Not since she’s left. Eternity is a lonely road when it’s just her. “Been around. Sight seeing lots.” Clara pauses to collect herself, trying to find the right words but there’s none.

“I missed you,” she ends up saying, trying to smile.

Eleanor smiles back, but it’s tight, controlled. She stares for a long while, not saying a word and Clara wonders how time and distance robbed her daughter of the ability to express affection.

“The brotherhood found us, mother.”

And Clara _does_ lunge at Eleanor then, grabbing her by the wrist rather than holding her, doesn’t let go.

_You’re not going back, you’re coming with me and we’ll run, you can forget about Frank._

She doesn’t say _that_ , of course; Eleanor wouldn’t like it, stubborn as she is, and Clara learned that lesson already. She can’t force things. She has to let them go ( _and then she’ll come back to her and that means she loves her, doesn’t it?_ ). 

Still, she says it. “We’ll run again.”

“No,” Eleanor says. She gently disentangles herself from Clara’s hand, but instead of pulling away she grabs on as well, her fingers overlaid with Clara’s. “I’m tired of that. I don’t want to run anymore.”

Clara stares at her daughter—who looks the same as the day she left, as the day Clara took her to the island. She’s heard those words before— _why can’t we stay longer? why do we always have to leave so soon?_ She’s always told her no, never explaining why. 

“They caught up with us once already and with me again. I’m not doing this anymore.” 

It’s not hard to hear what she means, now that she’s listening. _Stop treating me like a child._

“Alright.”

*

She mails a letter off to Darvell as soon as she can. It’s a simple letter, mailed off to a P.O. Box in the states.

_It’s time. We’re not doing this anymore._

“What’s that?” Eleanor asks, peering at the letter before Clara slips it in the envelope. The contents aren’t answer enough for her. 

“You remember Darvell, right?” She asks, watches the sparks light up in Eleanor’s eyes at his name. “Yes, well. It’s a message for him. He has something we need. He’s going to help us.” 

If he gets it, that is—the message is vague enough so The Brotherhood wouldn’t know what to make of it even if intercepted it, but other things could go wrong. Darvell may not receive it. It could get lost. It’s a delicate balance, to play double agent for her—obscure her location and mislead them away. A lot can go wrong.

All Clara has to do wait for the response back. As if that’s easy. Running away at least felt active. 

“What are we going to do?” Eleanor’s eyes are wide and bright blue, thoughts racing through her head behind them. “Do you have a plan?”

“We’re going to get rid of them,” Clara says simply. “That’s our plan.”

*

Once after Eleanor had left, one of the Brotherhood found her, ambushed her in her own hotel room, pretending to be room service she never ordered. Clara beat his head in with the phone, before cutting it off with his own sword.

She almost wishes more of them had come after her—it’s suicide to go seek them out herself, she knows, but she would have liked to take their heads off, one by one.

 _Fire works_ , Darvell had explained to her. That was years ago, in some hotel room in Italy, spilling secrets of their kind that shouldn’t have been secrets at all. 

_Fire and well, beheading. That works as well_. His voice feels like an echo in her head. 

_I could have told you that_ , Clara said to him, laughing at him. _It’s just common sense. What doesn’t fire and beheading kill?_

Darvell had chuckled. _It’s about the only thing that would work. Starvation drives us mad, but not to the point of death. Gunfire and knives, that’ll hurt, but you’ll live._

Clara shook her head. _I figured that out too on my own, thank you._

Darvell stayed by her side after Eleanor left, kept her company until she grew tired and bored and irritated by his presence, until she missed Eleanor so much, even the the smallest things Darvell did could set her off—the tone of his voice, the tenor of his speech, the way he dressed in the morning, the way he curled his lip when he grinned. A type of cabin fever claustrophobia had set in. She wanted to claw his face off by the end, but he left on his own—telling her that if she calls, he’d come running.

_If you call, we have our plan, remember?_

She didn’t want him go—oh, she told him to, pushed him out and away—but when he left, what else would there be, except the gnawing ache Eleanor had left and her own thoughts.

*

Clara takes Eleanor to a small cottage on the Spanish countryside, just to get out of the shadow of the Brotherhood. Then they cross country lines into Portugal, then double back to one of Spain’s smaller towns.

“We’ll wait a few weeks, then go back to Barcelona to see if there’s a response,” Clara explains. “In case the brotherhood was watching, we can throw them off our scents.”

“They didn’t follow me,” Eleanor states. “Frank and I split up to make sure that wouldn’t happen.”

Clara grimaces at the sound of his name again. _Is he even still alive_ , she wonders—if he didn’t die and that’s why Eleanor came back to her, because she was left alone as well. That would be an ugly thing to ask, so she keeps it to herself, waiting for Eleanor to tell her on her own time.

Even if he was alive, he might have been killed by now, how well could a vampire less than ten years old survive (or he might join the Brotherhood, if they found him; they might overlook that he was created by a woman because his sex).

“I’m just being careful,” Clara says, stressing the word. “I didn’t stay alive this long without being careful.” 

Eleanor narrows her eyes and Clara can tell she’s fuming. “Are we really waiting? Are you sure you’re not just planning to keep me around and string me along?”

A slap would have hurt less—she could hear her ears ringing. 

“Would I do that, Eleanor? Are you honestly asking me that?” Her voice is loud, sharp and and cracking just a bit and Eleanor quiets then, her face falling and losing expression.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but she runs out of their apartment after that, into the street. Clara chases after her, going to drag her inside—she almost does, crossing the street and calling to Eleanor, but she stops herself once Eleanor disappears in the crowd. _You’re not doing this anymore, remember_. She’s supposed to let her go.

It never feels right. What kind of a person lets the daughter just _go_? Watching her walk away was hard enough once.

(it’s only easy to let go when she’s not here at all)

Eleanor trails back in in the middle of the night while Clara is still awake, flipping through the channels. She spares a nod at her, but says nothing, hanging her jacket up heading to her bedroom.

“Is it so wrong that I want your company?” Clara says to the air, as she hears Eleanor open and close the door. 

The door stops in mid-closing, hovering open for a while, then clicks shut, knob locking.

*

Eleanor starts to write again—flipping through notebooks, filling them to the brim, then pulling out the pages and tearing them apart, shredding them, crumbling them and throwing them outside. Writing her story, then destroying it. Over and over.

Clara wants to take the notebook from her—tell her to be calm, that it’s all right, this will all be over soon, that they’re just waiting for the go ahead. 

_Maybe one day, you can publish it. It’ll have to be fiction, though, but that’ll be good enough, wouldn’t it?_ (Of course not; Eleanor wants to be honest.)

“I haven’t done this in years,” Eleanor says, watching a piece of paper float to the ground. “I just talk to Frank. Sometimes he writes, too.”

“You can talk to me,” Clara says but her own voice sounds tenuous in her ears, half soft and faded, not quite enough. Eleanor doesn’t reply. 

“Tell me what happened,” Clara asks, and that’s too much. Eleanor gets this _look_ on her face. Like of course she won’t. Clara hadn’t earned that yet.

*

They head back to Barcelona, to hole up in another crap hotel. Clara checks the mail. No reply yet. She can just accept they’re on their own here and that’s almost comforting, just the two of them, even if it’ll be a lot harder then—but she’s not ready to declare it a lost cause just yet. 

Clara gets work at a strip club again and Eleanor twists her lips when she comes home, not saying anything, but same vaguely disapproving look she always gives her.

“Did you forget about this part?” Clara says, shaking her hips playfully, and Eleanor looks away, frowning.

“Don’t you get tired of this?” she asks. “Don’t you want to do something different?”

“I like it,” Clara replies, perhaps too sharp. The men are pigs, but it’s familiar, the moves all the same. It never changes, no matter what year it is, and it’s good hunting ground.

“Nevermind,” Eleanor says. Just as well. They’ve had this conversation before. 

“Did you do something different?” Clara asks. _Will you tell me for once?_

It takes Eleanor a while to respond. Clara thought she was ignoring her, until she turned around. 

“I went to university,” Eleanor says blankly. She’s staring out the balcony window, rain falling gently. “In the states. Frank and I both did.”

Clara smiles, a genuine grin—she wants to reach out and hug her daughter and tell that’s wonderful (even if a part of that ate at her, that she did this with _Frank_ —she remembers the boy telling her that he’d take Eleanor away from her, that she was losing her, Clara seconds from strangling the life out of him).

“Why didn’t you let me go before?” Eleanor asks. She’s still staring out the window, not looking at Clara.

(Eleanor says it like she’s held her back)

“Because,” Clara starts out, her voice shaking, trying not to raise her voice. “It was dangerous. I was protecting you. Do you know how hard it is to enroll someone without papers?”

She knows all of that is true. She knows she did the right thing to protect her daughters; it’s been proven over and over, every time the Brotherhood comes into their lives. She still held her back.

“Yes,” Eleanor says. Calm and distant and detached, a solemn kind of tone as she watches the rain fall. “It wasn’t easy to forge my way in, but we managed.”

“Is that what got you found?”

Clara wishes she hadn’t asked that, because Eleanor turns to look at her, angry, fresh tears in her eyes.

“Yes,” Eleanor says, hissing. “I wish—I wish you hadn’t lied for so long. I wish I could have learned to _protect_ myself.”

There’s nothing else left to be said.

*

Clara’s sleeping in bed when Eleanor wakes her up. She’s standing over her, framed in dark shadows and a blue tint from the outside window neon lights leaking in through the cheap curtains. She’s silent as a ghost, simply hovering as she stares down at her mother.

“Is something happening?”

“I’m sorry,” Eleanor says. Her voice is soft and carries on the wind. Her expression is still angry and tearful, but softened around the edges, less harsh. “I’m sorry I was gone for so long.”

Clara’s eyes are wet and her throat clenches. “I’m sorry too,” she says and Eleanor slides into bed with her, curling up next to hear in the dark like a child again, like a young girl she rescued and birthed a second time when she took her away from the orphanage.

Ten years away and Eleanor still leans into her hugs, slides her head under Clara’s chin and rests there.

“I wish you could stay,” Clara says, stroking her hair back. There’s wetness behind her eyes. Eleanor makes a humming noise.

“I know.”

*

The letter arrives, no return address except for a stamp of a pearl on the letter.

_We’re ready._

She tells Eleanor they’re going back to Britain now. “It’s time.”

*

A week later, and Darvell is escorting them inside the brotherhood’s headquarters. It’s a large old building, a former church that got expanded, kept in pristine condition even though it should be rotting. She’s been here before, just once, dragged in to be interrogated when she needed to prove herself as _worthy_. Just that once. She never wanted to venture anywhere near it again, even once they put a price on her and her daughter’s head.

But now she was smiling, head buzzing with excitement, the way it does before she feeds sometimes, waiting for just the right moment to reveal herself.

“They’re outside,” he says. “Hurry quick, I can only keep them out for so long. You’ll want to be out of here in twenty minutes.”

He hands her a heavy box. “You know how to work this, right?”

“I remember our plan,” Clara says, snatching it from him and rolling her eyes. “It was my idea, was it not?”

Darvell’s lips quirk up in a ghost of a smile. “I just want to make sure this goes smoothly. I’m the traitor they’ll burn for this if we get caught.”

“And I wouldn’t?”

“I think we both know you’d find a way to escape,” he says, eyes glinting even with his somber tone.

Clara grins at him, all teeth and hungry anticipation. “And I deeply appreciate it, Darvell. We both do,” she glances at Eleanor and places a hand on her shoulder, who is still staring with her head cocked at Darvell, not entirely sure what to make of him still. He gives them both a grim nod, eyes meeting Eleanor’s unblinking blue eyes for a little while longer, and walks back out.

“Is that…” Eleanor’s voice trails off, staring and reaching out tentatively towards the box. “Is that what you told me about?”

“See for yourself.” Clara hands her the box. It’s brown and cardboard, like a mailed package, but this never went through the mail. It’s just something she’d ask Darvell to be prepared to acquire, should the situation ever arise. _Fire works_.

“Oh,” Eleanor says, toneless except for the slight shortness of breath when she opens it. “Bombs.”

*

It’s a quick rushed job, but it’s simple enough to plant them—all they had to do was find the right spots and switch them on, set to detonate in thirty minutes—enough time for both of them and Darvell to scatter. 

She could have had Darvell done this himself, of course—it would have been much less risky for them both—but Clara needed the satisfaction, more than she needed to be safe. She needed to watch them burn).

They split up, planting the bombs in separate corners of the headquarters—the most populated areas, the places mostly likely to be teaming with people, the ones where the Brotherhood gather to meet and talk amongst themselves. 

She could have done this without Eleanor as well, but Eleanor—grown up Eleanor, ten years gone Eleanor, her Ella—wouldn’t have stood by the sidelines, not anymore.

When she’s done, Clara finds Eleanor in the library, the bomb already planted and ready to blow, Eleanor carrying a handful of books she’s snatched from their archives.

“Those will slow you down,” Clara says. “Drop them.”

“No,” Eleanor says. Her eyes are alight. “I’m taking them. They’re _ancient_. We could learn about us—our kind.”

“Does it look like I care about how old the binding is? Drop them.”

Eleanor doesn’t listen. Clara’s not surprised, but she lets her keep her new books and stories. 

Clara just wants to see it go down in flames, all of it—she doesn’t care about a backstory penned by men, records that are biased and only half truths, if there’s any truth at all. The only shame here is that she didn’t get to rip their heads off herself.

*

It ends with fire.

Smoke and flames lick at the ends of the building as they watch it crumble and crack. The detonation was loud (if she listened hard enough, she could hear screaming—the sound only lasted for a few seconds, before it was engulfed in the roar and crackle of flames, but it was long enough) and felt like a small earthquake, a tremor she could feel in her bones and spine and she was glad for it.

She gets a text message from Darvell a little while after the bombs go off. _All clear._

Clara smiles, feeling light on her feet. The world stretches out before them both, wider than it’s ever been. She could fall in it and get lost, for real now, never let anyone find her that she didn’t want.

“Is it over?” Eleanor asks, standing at her side.

“No,” Clara says. “It never ends, Eleanor. There’s always someone who doesn’t want us to live. Who wants to teach us a lesson.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“Because it’s a start,” she smiles wider at her daughter, wrapping her in a tight hug and breathing in. She smells of smoke, strangely, and gunpowder, even though she was far from the flames. “It’s a start.”

Eleanor nods, staying in her mother’s arms for a long time, until she starts to pull away, stepping back. “I have to find Frank,” she says. Her blue eyes are open and wide, watching Clara unblinkingly. “Now that we’re free.”

Clara should focus on the words _we’re_ and _free_ , but what she sees is her world closing off a little bit more again.

“You’re not staying.” It shouldn’t be a surprise. Of course she’s not. She shouldn’t have expected her. _You have to let them go._

Eleanor shakes her head. “No. I never planned on it.” 

Clara steps back, turns around, tries not to look at Ella. Tries not to look at anything except the flames eating up the headquarters. 

“I’m glad you helped me with this,” she says. Her voice cracks.

There’s a hand on her shoulder, pulling her attention back. Eleanor’s hair is falling into her face, blown by the wind and she’s smiling. She outstretched her hand to her. “Do you want to come with me?”


End file.
